The Institutions of the European Union endeavour to be transparent, open and accessible. They want to be seen in the best possible light by the public at large. We share this objective, and intend to contribute to its achievement.

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August 2011

August 26, 2011

The Government’s overall approach to Transparency is being set out in Making Open Data Real: a public consultation. Transparency across government and public services is a powerful lever for a whole range of positive outcomes:

Increasing accountability

Building public confidence in government bodies

Stimulating efficiency gains within the public sector

Promoting greater citizen engagement

Stimulating economic growth.

It is recognised that there are vast opportunities to support these outcomes in making the data that public sector organisations collect more freely available. Government is exploring what more it can do to maximise the growth opportunities from this data as part of the second phase of its Growth Review. More broadly the Open Data consultation makes a series of proposals aimed at establishing a culture of openness and transparency in public services, including enhancing a ‘Right to Data’ and how public service providers might be held to account for delivering Open Data.

August 25, 2011

... The Leibniz Center for Law of the University of Amsterdam has made all Dutch legislation available as CEN MetaLex and Linked Open Data through the MetaLex Document Server portal (MDS) [1].

The MetaLex Document Server project was started to overcome limitations of the legal content services provided by the Dutch government: the XML source documents currently made available by the Dutch government are simply not good enough.

The MetaLex Document Server improves over the XML API of the official portal by:

* Providing persistent, versioned identifiers of all elements of regulations. * Maintaining source XML for all versions of legislation since May 2011, rather than only the latest version. * All metadata is published as RDF Linked Data, is linked to the original legislative sources, and uses standard vocabularies such as the MetaLex Ontology, Dublin Core, Open Provenance Model Vocabulary, Simple Event Model,FOAF, etc. * All documents and metadata are available through 'content negotiation': content can be retrieved by using the URI (identifier) of an element as a URL. * Metadata is accessible through a SPARQL endpoint * Citations between regulations are made available in a format suitable for social network analysis (Pajek/Gephi) * A generic conversion script for transforming any legislative XML to CEN MetaLex

For more information, visit the website [1] have a look at the presentation on slideshare [2], or contact me directly.

A report on this work will be published as part of the proceedings of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2011: "Rinke Hoekstra. The MetaLex Document Server - Legal Documents as Versioned Linked Data"

August 22, 2011

Welcome! The World Wide Web Consortium invites all who work within governments or those who work or engage with governments to participate in the many opportunities sponsored by W3C and the Web community.

W3C's eGovernment Activity currently offers speakers, discussion forums, educational information, and guidelines focused on helping governments to publish data in open, standards-based formats so that information can be more easily accessed on the Web.

August 20, 2011

Search and email remain the two online activities that are nearly universal among adult internet users, as 92% of online adults use search engines to find information on the Web, and a similar number (92%) use email. Since the Pew Internet Project began measuring adults' online activities in the last decade, these two behaviors have consistently ranked as the most popular, even as new platforms, broadband and mobile devices continue to reshape the way Americans use the internet and web. Even as early as 2002, more than eight in ten online adults were using search engines, and more than nine in ten online adults were emailing.

Perhaps the most significant change over that time is that both activities have become more habitual. Today, roughly six in ten online adults engage in each of these activities on a typical day; in 2002, 49% of online adults used email each day, while just 29% used a search engine daily.

by Alex Howard. Gov20.GovFresh, July 27, 2011. "Over the past 48 hours, the volume of citizens trying to contact Congress regarding the debt ceiling and budget debate has overwhelmed Congressional websites and Capital Hill switchboards. Citizens that want to reach their member(s) of Congress now have a powerful upgrade to one of the best options online: an improved version of Open Congress..."

by Alex Howard. Gov20.GovFresh, August 1, 2011. "Over the course of the last year, the White House has experimented with each of the leading social media platforms to solicit questions and host conversations around events. Tomorrow in Silicon Valley, the nation will see if a LinkedIn forum can generate useful results. The 'White House Council on Jobs and Effectiveness' will host a session on job creation that features questions submitted from LinkedIn..."